4 posts tagged “ants”
The Queen is still in the tube, and all is very still. I think they are hibernating.
There has been some motion recently though and a couple of workers made a start excavating a tunnel in the sand at the weekend.
The first generation of Triops have died out. All four died within 24 hours so I don't think it was natural. Not sure what killed them. I probably left it too long between changes. They should have been around long enough to have been laying eggs, so I'm going to dry things out for a couple of weeks and see if anything hatches if I just add water.
The contact area of the cover has been smeared with vaseline to stop the ants escaping once the lagoon has fully dried up.
Her majesty has decided that the optimal nest position is at the bottom of the clear tube that runs from the Ant World formicarium to "Ant Island" and her subjects have busily gathered some detritus and half blocked one end of the pipe. Apparently not uncommon for an intermediate site to be chosen before moving underground.
So much for my attempts at making the Ant World more inviting.
I'm not even going to attempt photos. The resolution of my camera phone is awful and it has a cracked lens. Taking photos of ants through plastic with such a device would be doomed to failure.
OK, so before I started my reading on bees and became hooked I had started reading up on another social insect: the ant. Charlotte was only too happy for us to get Antlantis (a combination formicarium and triops pool) as a learning experience for Lex as well as for myself and Charlotte.
We also ordered a colony of Lasius Niger (the common black ant found in the garden) from Edu-Sci Ltd which arrived yesterday. They have now been shaken out into their new home and I have covered the sides of the formicarium with paper to give some shade which should speed up the process of building the initial tunnels and establishing the nest.
I seem to have switched to hyper mode. I use the word fascinating a lot below. Apologies but it is the best word for how I feel about this subject.
I have become fascinated by beekeeping over the last few days. It all started at the weekend when I saw a toy called Antlantis in the Argos catalogue. When I was a kid I was fascinated by insects and especially ants, bees and water insects (the all time favourite was always the Water Boatman). Me and my best friend Buddy used to go out collecting bees in an old drink bottle and spend hours watching them. Looking back on it we were incredibly cruel, as most young lads are; however at the heart of it all was fascination.
Anyway. Back to now. Initially I looked at Antlantis and thought "cool" then I started doing some googling on ants and triops. Both incredibly fascinating creatures in very different ways.
Then while following links I stumbled across a couple of beekeeping sites and the lure of buying a queen ant suddenly dropped off. An ant colony is a fascinating thing but ultimately its just a curiosity.
Reading some of the online information about honey bees brought the childhood fascination flooding back, the innocent sense of wonder.
A honey bee colony is a truly fascinating thing. The queen is the mother of all but can and will be replaced regularly (ant queens will live for 10 years but the more active queen bee only lives for up to 5). Again unlike ants the natural multiplication method of swarming is when the old queen leaves set found a new colony with attendants; handing the reigns over to a daughter. Ant princesses are the ones that leave the nest to found their own dynasty.
The structure of domestic hives are pretty fascinating too. Just wide enough to provoke the bees to build honey comb rather than fill in the gaps. The queen is kept at the bottom to keep her from laying eggs in with the honey stored above. At the moment this seems to be a true fascination rather than a passing fad. That has happened before though. I need to be careful.
Fortunately I have come to this at the right time of year. All I can do at the moment is read and learn. I can't actually start with any bees until April / May next year. If it is a fad and passes before then I don't have the problem of disposing of tens of thousands of live bees.
